June 9, 2026, 12:27 pm | Read time: 2 minutes
A deep-set eye, leathery skin, and a mouth full of sharp teeth: The photo of an unusual sea creature sparked numerous speculations online in 2022. An Australian commercial fisherman had hauled the approximately 1.5-meter-long animal from more than 500 meters deep off the coast of Australia. Was it a shark, a chimaera, or possibly even an undiscovered species? A marine zoology expert assessed the mysterious find for PETBOOK.
Shark or Chimaera?
But what had the fisherman caught in his net? Dr. Moritz Sonnewald, a marine zoology expert at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt am Main, speculated to PETBOOK that it was a short-nosed chimaera. However, the animal could not be definitively identified from the single photo. “Unfortunately, I can’t say much more than that it should be a short-nosed chimaera, as you can see only one gill opening instead of several slits. However, it has a somewhat unusual snout shape for Australian chimaeras,” Sonnewald explained. For him, it was definitely an “interesting find.”
The Australian commercial fisherman Trapman Bermagui, on the other hand, believed the animal to be a type of roughskin shark. “They live at great depths of more than 500 meters. There are many different species in various sizes,” he told PETBOOK. According to him, the mysterious creature was about 1.5 meters long and weighed around 15 kilograms.
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Even before this find, the Australian commercial fisherman Trapman Bermagui had caught unusual deep-sea fish in his net. On Facebook, he regularly shared photos of the exotic animals, which, with their leathery skin and prominent teeth, looked like creatures from long-gone eras. Another catch also closely resembled the mysterious creature.
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And what happened to the caught deep-sea animals afterward? “We sold them. They are very tasty, and the liver is used in cosmetics,” Trapman Bermagui explained to PETBOOK. However, the weekly catch of these deep-sea fish was limited.